Jacques-Germain Soufflot

Jacques-Germain Soufflot designed the Panthéon in Paris and spent his life defending a structure his critics said would fall down. Born near Auxerre in 1713, the son of a lawyer, he went to Rome at nineteen without permission or funding and studied there for seven years at his own initiative, which was unusual and shaped everything afterwards. He settled in Lyon, built the Hôtel-Dieu and the theatre, and made a second Italian journey in 1750 with the Marquis de Marigny, the brother of Madame de Pompadour and future director of royal buildings. On it he visited Paestum and made measured drawings of the Greek Doric temples — among the first Frenchmen to study them seriously. Marigny's patronage brought him to Paris and, in 1755, the commission for a new church of Sainte-Geneviève. His ambition for it was explicit: to combine the lightness and structural daring of Gothic construction with the vocabulary of classical antiquity. The interior is carried on slender columns rather than piers, so that the Greek cross plan reads as a colonnaded space under a dome, with as little masonry as possible. He used iron reinforcement concealed within the stone. The critics, led by Pierre Patte, argued that the piers were too slender for the dome. Cracks appeared during construction, and the dispute ran for years; Soufflot was said to have been made ill by it. The piers were strengthened after his death, and the building has stood. He died in 1780, before completion. The Revolution converted it in 1791 into a mausoleum for the nation's great men and blocked up its windows.

• Lived: 1713 CE – 1780 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: architect